In 2012, Civil Rights activist, Lawrence Guyot, talks about Fannie Lou Hamer and how she became a civil rights icon.

In this Aug. 21, 1964, photograph, Fannie Lou Hamer, a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, speaks before the credentials committee of the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, in efforts to win accreditation for the largely African-American group as Mississippi's delegation to the convention, instead of the all-white state delegation.(Photo: ANONYMOUS/AP)

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is providing funding to help an award-winning journalist produce a documentary on a subject close to her heart — the life and legacy of her great-aunt, Mississippi native and civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer.

The foundation awarded the $272,000 grant to Tougaloo College for the documentary, titled “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America,” to be produced by Monica Land. In addition to the film, a corresponding K-12 “Find Your Voice” civil rights curriculum is being partially funded through the grant.

“Mississippi is consistently on the bottom of the metric scale in so many different areas,” Land said in a news release. “And the Kellogg Foundation has worked for years to ensure the educational and fundamental well-being of children in poverty-stricken and educationally starved regions there. So, we are tremendously grateful to them for seeing our vision for this film and curriculum as clearly as we did, as well as Tougaloo College, where Aunt Fannie Lou maintained a strong presence.”

Land, who was 9 years old when her great-aunt died, developed the concept for the film, which she says gets away from the the traditional talking heads documentary and allows Hamer to tell her story through extensive footage.

“People of all ages can learn so much from Mrs. Hamer’s life,” Jed Oppenheim, a Mississippi-based program officer from the Kellogg Foundation, said in the news release. “We are hopeful that by sharing her voice and story with students and families in Sunflower County and beyond, that others will be inspired to know our shared history and continue to advance the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer and so many others who fought for a stronger, more equitable country.”

The film’s producers chose Tougaloo as a fiscal sponsor for the grant because of its history and commitment to social justice. Tougaloo served as a safe-haven for many civil rights activists, like the demonstrators and Freedom Riders of the 1960s’ civil rights movement. Among those who found solace behind Tougaloo’s gates was Hamer, who became a frequent lecturer at the college during this time. She received an honorary degree from Tougaloo in 1969. Tougaloo is also home to the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and hosts an annual conference in their honor.

“Tougaloo’s involvement in the civil rights movement is a vital part of Mississippi history, and this film will enable us to further document our leading role as a change agent in the struggle for freedom and equality through the work and life of Fannie Lou Hamer,” Tougaloo President Beverly Wade Hogan said in the news release. “And most importantly, it will perpetuate one of Tougaloo’s founding principles, which is to educate students and prepare them to be, not only trailblazers in their respective fields, but to also develop a sense of social responsibility in a global context.”

Known for her powerful speeches, soul-stirring songs and impassioned pleas for equal rights, Hamer, a sharecropper-turned-civil-rights-activist, became a symbol of the largest grassroots movement for social justice in American history. Following her powerful testimony before the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, Hamer became one of the most sought-after speakers of the civil rights movement. She helped change voting laws and spoke for the unrepresented by forming the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Though she was primarily known for her 1960s activism, Hamer was also a humanitarian, providing housing, educational programs and food for the downtrodden in the Mississippi Delta. After a vicious jailhouse beating years earlier, and the stresses of hypertension and breast cancer, Hamer died in March 1977, at the age of 59.

“Fannie Lou Hamer’s America,” currently in pre-production, allows Hamer to tell her own story — in her own words — by means of personal letters, as well as audio and video footage recorded during her 15-year career as a human rights activist. The educational curriculum, “Find Your Voice,” designed to accompany the film, will be developed in Hamer’s native Sunflower County but global in scope. It will include an interactive, multimodal website and a young filmmaker’s workshop that will teach local high school students the art of digital storytelling.

Hamer authors and scholars, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis Houck, are designing the civil rights curriculum to be an ongoing program involving teacher-student-related projects with an additional focus on youth empowerment and community engagement in the underprivileged Mississippi Delta.

"Students, educators, and artists across the country regularly contact us asking for materials to further their study of Mrs. Hamer,” Brooks said in the news release. "Beyond providing a more detailed, complex and compelling portrait of the civil rights icon, the ‘Fannie Lou Hamer's America’ documentary and the related 'Find Your Voice' curriculum will encourage students to discover the injustices that surround them and enable them to develop tools of advocacy to challenge these injustices."

Award-winning filmmaker Keith Beauchamp is the executive producer of the documentary. His 2005 documentary “The Untold Story of Emmett Till” prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen the teen's homicide case resulting in the exhumation of Till's body. Joseph Davenport, whose film “M.F.D.P.” detailed Hamer’s formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, is the director and editor.

"Here is a woman that came from the bottom of the barrel, growing up on a plantation, and, yet, she was so vocal and powerful," Beauchamp said. "She started this movement known as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that people are still talking about today. She didn't have the best education in the world, but what she had was that voice."